Hi! I am working on a project to turn a Raspberry Pi 4 board into a wifi access point, and we are running into a few roadblocks. We first tried to do this by configuring hostapd and DHCP using the Raspbian OS. However, after setting up the AP, the board would no longer connect to the internet.
Now, we switched strategies and are using OpenWRT, which we flashed onto a new micro SD card using Etcher. We have followed the basic setup tutorials online, but are unable to reach the OpenWRT web server with the Pi board's IP address. We have tried troubleshooting by checking the network and DNS configurations, but we are still unsuccessful.
This is really frustrating because this is our first step to get started. We are using a monitor and wireless keyboard, and we are connected to our router using an ethernet cable, but we still do not seem to be connected to the internet. We are unable to ping the board from our own devices, and the board also cannot ping Google.
We would appreciate any advice for next steps on how to resolve this and move forward!
While physically possible, the performance will be terrible. All Raspberry Pi boards have really low end wifi chipsets that are severely limited in many respects. It's really not worth it unless you only need low bandwidth, close range wifi.
In a basic default configuration, you don't need to do much to get wifi running -- set your country code, SSID name, encryption type, passphrase, and then enable wifi.
First, what image did you download and install?
Then, how are you connecting to the Pi? Are you able to ping it? Can you connect via ssh?
You are not at all clear on your desired topology, but with some imagination I read that as a desire to use the onboard radio both as client towards 'the internet', as well as its own AP (repeating the incoming network), this mode of functionality would not be possible with Broadcom fullmac hardware.
…but I may read too much into the rather sparse information given.
Thank you for your help! We downloaded the Factory (ext4) image for Raspberry Pi 4B/400/CM4 (64bit) from this link: https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=23.05.1&target=bcm27xx%2Fbcm2711&id=rpi-4
We are trying to connect to the Pi from our laptops and we tried to do it by going to http:// and by doing ssh, but neither worked. We are not able to ping it either.
Sorry I’m a beginner in all of this… and this is my first post in a forum like this as well. I was just looking for some guidance and hoping someone else ran into a similar issue. Thank you to everyone who has been giving me suggestions.
Right now I am using a Raspberry Pi 4 model B board with a monitor connected through HDMI, a wireless keyboard, and a power supply of course. My board is connected to my router with an Ethernet cable.
As for my desired topology, I am turning my Raspberry Pi 4 board into a wifi AP. We downloaded the Factory (ext4) image for Raspberry Pi 4B/400/CM4 (64bit) and used Etcher to flash the image onto our micro SD card. I tried to set up OpenWrt, but my Pi board doesn’t seem to be connected to my internet despite being connected to it through an Ethernet cable. I want to be able to connect my devices to it so I can eventually learn how to put them in different VLANs.
Please let me know if there is any additional information you need. I am just here to learn.
This is the 1st problem, the RPi will try to be the DHCP, if there's already one, it'll just stay on the default IP, but if the current LAN subnet's different, it'll appear to be unreachable.
Hi, I am little confused. How will the Pi be connected to the internet if it is not connected to the router? We also do not have a computer with an Ethernet port, do we need one?
Also, my Pi is not connected to a computer, we are connected to a monitor currently using HDMI.
I'm sorry, could you be a little more specific? This is my first time working with any of these technologies.
I played around with the network configuration earlier today, but we weren't able to figure out the the correct configuration.
By default, the ethernet port is setup as a lan port and the wifi is disabled. That's the standard for all OpenWrt installations (although you can customize to change this behavior by using the firmware selector's custom images option).
I would highly recommend getting a simple USB-ethernet dongle. They're easy to find and inexpensive, and can be really useful. Espeecially if you'll ever be working with devices that don't have an HDMI and keyboard port (i.e. normal consumer routers), you'll need to have ethernet access.
We really need to know your detailed goals. Getting it to accept a DHCP lease from your router is easy -- set the lan to protocol DHCP instead of static, and remove the address and subnet lines from the lan interface stanza (you'll see this in /etc/config/network)
Can you elaborate here? What are you trying to do with multiple networks?
To be clear, the Pi can only broadcast a single SSID, so your VLAN configurations would only be realized with a managed switch. Do you have one already?
First of all, how do you plan to have VLANs? RPi has one Ethernet port, which as you said, is connected to router for internet. That being the case, how do you plan to connect other devices to RPi and experiment with VLANs? Only over Wi-Fi?
Yes, a managed switch will be a requirement if you're working with VLANs.
Also, if you're working with a wan + lan configuration, you really want at least 2 ethernet ports (it's possible on one port, but you need to have a managed switch and there are some nuances that can really mess things up if you don't already know what you're doing).
The Pi can easily be configured with VLANs on the built-in and/or USB based ethernet ports, but a managed switch is required here.
Importantly... you may be better off with a standard consumer all-in-one wifi router which will have several benefits:
Many of them are 5 port devices -- one for the upstream and then 4 ports downstream.
With the built-in switch, you can configure VLANs/subnets on a per-port basis or create one or more trunk ports to carry the networks to another VLAN aware device like an AP or managed switch. Basically, the built-in switch is a small managed switch.
A downstream managed switch is not necessarily required unless you need more ports and/or need to learn how to trunk VLANs and configure downstream devices.
The built-in wifi for most of these types of devices is generally good (obviously model dependent)... effectively all of these devices will have much better than the performance you'll get from a Pi's wifi.
Many of the built-in wifi chipsets have support for multiple SSIDs, which means you can create wireless networks for multiple subnets/VLANs. This is not possible on a Pi.
Hi, thank you for your help! This is the network configuration we currently have now, using uci show network. Can you tell us which lines we need to change and what they should be?
not without more context... we'd need to know if the device should use DHCP from the upstream router or a static IP.
This takes nearly zero effort... but it makes it just a dumb AP (just a wifi bridge that is connected to the upstream network).
You also mentioned you are going to be setting up VLANs... this is where you're going to start running into problems -- all described in earlier posts.
Can you clarify specifically what do you expect to achieve with this Pi?
Yes, we did this already and we did run into problems with setting up VLANs.
We are trying to implement VLAN micro segmentation, as a project for our IoT device class, in order to learn more about network security.
